Wednesday, January 20, 2016

The Sun in white light

88% waxing, gibbous Moon

A tripod mounted Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ72 bridge camera at 60x optical zoom was used to image the 88% waxing, gibbous Moon. The camera was set to ISO-100 and 1/250s exposure at f/5.9. 101 images, were precisely cropped and registered in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop software, stacked and wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 with post processing in Photoshop. Click on the image to get a closer view:

Astronomical sketches of the Moon and Sun

The Orion Nebula and the Moon

An LN300 video camera, fitted with an IR/UV cut filter was placed at the Newtonian focus of a Star Discovery, f/5, 150mm Newtonian and 150 frame AVIs were captured at 4 different exposures. The AVIs were stacked in Registax and the resulting images were derotated and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker. The resulting image was post processed in Photoshop:

An animation was made of the separate exposures and the final image to show the information that can be extracted from the images when combined.

The data were captured in a bright, moonlit sky.

A 25mm eyepiece was fitted to the Newtonian and an afocal image of part of the Moon was captured afocally with a Samsung WB600 compact camera. Click on an image to get a closer view:

A Pentax K-x DSLR camera fitted with the lens from a 2x Barlow was attached to the 150mm Newtonian (the Barlow lens is to increase the focal length of the system to allow the camera to be brought to focus). Two sets of 10 images that overlapped were captured at ISO 200 and 1/100s exposure. The two sets of images were stacked in Registax and the resulting images were combined and post processed in Photoshop. The image ws saturation enhanced to reveal the differences in surface mineralogy of the Moon and an animation was made of the saturation enhanced and desaturated images:

A tripod mounted Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ72 bridge camera at 60x optical zoom was used to image the 82% waxing, gibbous Moon. The camera was set to ISO-100 and 1/640s exposure at f/5.9. 98 images, were precisely cropped and registered in Nicola Mackin's AstroCrop software, stacked and wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 with post processing in Photoshop.